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US Designates Non-Existent Cartel as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization’ To Justify Attacks on Venezuela

The US State Department on Monday formally designated the Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, a group that doesn’t actually exist, as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization,” providing a pretext for a potential attack on Venezuela.

The term “Cartel of the Suns” was first used in the 1990s to describe two Venezuelan military generals with sun insignias on their uniforms who were involved in cocaine trafficking. According to a 60 Minutes report that aired in 1993, one of the generals was working with the CIA at the time.

Today, the term is used to describe a loose network of Venezuelan military and government officials allegedly involved in drug trafficking, but the Cartel of the Suns doesn’t actually exist as a structured organization.

According to InSight Crime, a think tank that receives grants from the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, recent US sanctions mischaracterized the Cartel of the Suns, which InSight described as “a system of corruption wherein military and political officials profit by working with drug traffickers.”

Despite the reality, the US is now calling the Cartel of the Suns a terrorist organization and claims that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is its leader, a push being led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has long sought regime change in Caracas.

President Trump has claimed that the terror designation would allow him to target Maduro or his assets, but any US attack on Venezuela would be illegal without congressional authorization. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said in an interview last week that the designation gives the Pentagon “new options” to go after the “cartel,” meaning the Venezuelan government.

The real allegation against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, according to InSight Crime, is that he allows lower-level officials to profit from the drug trade to keep them content. InSight said that the Venezuelan officials aren’t necessarily directing drug shipments but rather use their “positions to protect traffickers from arrest and ensure that shipments pass through a territory.”

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Federal Appeals Court Deems Gun Ban For Marijuana Consumers Unconstitutional, Dismissing Conviction

A federal court has tossed a firearms conviction against a man because it determined that the underlying alleged crime—possession of a gun while being a user of marijuana—is unconstitutional.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth District on Friday said the crux of the case is “whether the Second Amendment protects a habitual marijuana user from being permanently dispossessed of a firearm based on our Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

The ruling comes as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs the constitutionality of the federal ban on gun ownership by people who use marijuana and other drugs. Numerous federal courts have issued rulings on the issue in recent years, but the legal challenge has yet to be settled.

The case of Kevin LaMarcus Mitchell is somewhat unique, in that the appeals court made an assessment about the cannabis and firearms question in the context of a ruling to invalidate a conviction for general unlawful gun possession.

What the court ultimately determined is that the federal statute § 922(g)(3) doesn’t meet the standards of Supreme Court precedent in the case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which held that gun laws restricting the Second Amendment must be set in a way that’s consistent with the country’s founding.

The appeals court found that there was no “sufficient evidence of present intoxication” when Mitchell was prosecuted, and so “admission of being a habitual marijuana user is not enough to justify § 922(g)(1)’s permanent ban on his firearm possession.”

“The implication of a ruling to the contrary would be that Michell was always intoxicated from age nineteen onward based on his admission, and our historical laws could be applied to him at any point during that period,” the majority ruling said.

“Accordingly, we REVERSE the district court’s denial of Mitchell’s motion to dismiss and VACATE the judgment of conviction and sentence,” it said. “The government’s motion to supplement the record is DENIED as moot.”

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court recently granted a request from the Trump administration to extend the deadline to submit briefs in a case concerning the constitutionality of the federal gun ban on gun ownership for cannabis users.

After justices agreed to take the case, U.S. v. Hemani, last month, DOJ told the court there was mutual agreement between its attorneys and those representing the respondent in the case that the initial deadline for briefs and reply briefs should be revised because of the “press of other cases.”

Relatedly, a coalition of gun rights organizations recently urged the Supreme Court to expand its examination of the constitutionality of the federal firearm ban for cannabis consumers—telling justices that a recent case on the issue it accepted would not properly settle the question of the current law’s constitutionality.

With respect to Hemani, in a separate August filing for the case, the Justice Department also emphasized that “the question presented is the subject of a multi-sided and growing circuit conflict.” In seeking the court’s grant of cert, the solicitor general also noted that the defendant is a joint American and Pakistani citizen with alleged ties to Iranian entities hostile to the U.S., putting him the FBI’s radar.

Now that the Supreme Court has agreed to take up Hemani, if justices declare 922(g)(3) constitutional, such a ruling could could mean government wins in the remaining cases. The high court last month denied a petition for cert in U.S. v. Cooper, while leaving pending decisions on U.S. v. Daniels and U.S. v. Sam.

The court also recently denied a petition for cert in another gun and marijuana case, U.S. v. Baxter, but that wasn’t especially surprising as both DOJ and the defendants advised against further pursing the matter after a lower court reinstated his conviction for being an unlawful user of a controlled substance in possession of a firearm.

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‘Slender Man’ stabber Morgan Geyser escapes group home, cuts off ankle monitor – 11 years after horrifying attack

One of the “Slender Man stabbers” — who viciously ambushed and hacked a classmate when she was 12 years old in an effort to please a made-up internet boogeyman — has vanished, and cops are hunting her.

Morgan Geyser, 23, cut off her ankle monitor and escaped from the group home where she was living — and she’s on the run, according to cops in Madison, Wisconsin.

“Her whereabouts are unknown as of Sunday morning,” police said.

Geyser, along with her friend Anissa Weier, lured a fellow sixth-grade girl into a Waukesha, Wisconsin, park in 2014 and stabbed her 19 times.

The attack was an effort to impress “Slender Man,” a supernatural character that rose to viral prominence on internet forums and was later the subject of a 2018 horror movie.

Miraculously, the victim survived the horrifying assault, crawling her way to safety until she was found by a passing bicyclist.

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The GRANITE ACT: Wyoming Bill Targets Foreign Censors With $10M Penalties

The first cannon shot in a new kind of free speech war came not from Washington or Silicon Valley, but from Cheyenne. Wyoming Representative Daniel Singh last week filed the Wyoming GRANITE Act.

The “Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny & Extortion Act,” passed, would make Wyoming the first state to let American citizens sue foreign governments that try to police what they say online.

The bill traces back to a blog post by attorney Preston Byrne, the same lawyer representing 4chan and Kiwi Farms in their battles against censorship-driven British regulators.

Byrne’s idea was simple: if the UK’s Ofcom or Brazil’s Alexandre de Moraes wanted to fine or threaten Americans over online speech, the US should hit back hard.

Exactly one month after that idea appeared on his blog, it’s now inked into Wyoming legislative paperwork.

Byrne said:

“This bill has a long way to go until it becomes a law, it’s got to make it through legislative services, then to Committee, and then get introduced on the floor for a vote, but the important thing is, the journey of this concept, the idea of a foreign censorship shield law which also creates a civil cause of action against foreign censors, into law has begun.”

That “journey” may be the kind of slow procedural trudge that usually kills most ideas in committee, but the intent here is anything but mild, and, with the growing threat of censorship demands from the UK, Brazil, Europe, and Australia, there is a lot of momentum here to fight back.

“For the first time, state legislators are moving to implement rules that will allow U.S. citizens to strike back, hard, against foreign countries that want to interfere with Americans’ civil rights online,” Byrne continued.

The Act would let American citizens and companies sue foreign governments or their agents for trying to censor them, and, crucially, it strips away the usual escape hatch of sovereign immunity.

In its legal filing responding to the 4chan and KiwiFarms lawsuit, Ofcom insisted it has “sovereign immunity” and told the court there were “substantial grounds” for throwing out the case on that basis.

The regulator’s lawyers framed Ofcom as a protected arm of the British state, immune from civil claims even when its decisions target a platform based entirely inside the United States.

Ofcom treats the idea of “sovereign immunity” as something substantial but the First Amendment as something that does not exist at all.

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Inside the Pentagon’s Review of Christopher Mellon’s Alleged UFO Crash Retrieval Text

A newly released set of Defense Department documents reveals how the Pentagon handled former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon’s request to publish a message he said referenced an alleged effort to exploit “recovered off-world technology.” The records also reveal that Mellon’s first attempt to submit the material was returned to him after a DOPSR employee deemed his three-page mailed package a “security threat,” a detail he did not disclose in his public article.

The documents, sent to The Black Vault under FOIA case 24-F-1134, include Mellon’s original submission to the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review (DOPSR), internal emails, coordination records, and the March 1, 2024 approval that cleared him to release the message.

The 17 pages released by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) document DOPSR’s handling of Mellon’s submission from January through March 2024. The records show repeated delays, escalating internal pressure, and direct involvement from the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which was tasked with coordinating on the review.

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Mind-altering ‘brain weapons’ no longer only science fiction, say researchers

Sophisticated and deadly “brain weapons” that can attack or alter human consciousness, perception, memory or behaviour are no longer the stuff of science fiction, two British academics argue.

Michael Crowley and Malcolm Dando, of Bradford University, are about to publish a book that they believe should be a wake-up call to the world.

They are this weekend travelling to The Hague for a key meeting of states, arguing that the human mind is a new frontier in warfare and there needs to be urgent global action to prevent the weaponisation of neuroscience.

“It does sound like science fiction,” said Crowley. “The danger is that it becomes science fact.”

The book, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, explores how advances in neuroscience, pharmacology and artificial intelligence are coming together to create a new threat.

“We are entering an era where the brain itself could become a battlefield,” said Crowley. “The tools to manipulate the central nervous system – to sedate, confuse or even coerce – are becoming more precise, more accessible and more attractive to states.”

The book traces the fascinating, if appalling, history of state-sponsored research into central nervous system (CNS)-acting chemicals.

During the cold war and after, the US, Soviet Union and China all “actively sought” to develop CNS-acting weapons, said Crowley. Their purpose was to cause prolonged incapacitation to people, including “loss of consciousness or sedation or hallucination or incoherence or paralysis and disorientation”.

The only time a CNS-acting weapon was used at scale was by the Russian Federation in 2002 to end the Moscow theatre siege. Security forces used fentanyl derivatives to end the siege, in which armed Chechen militants had taken 900 theatregoers hostage.

Most of the hostages were freed, but more than 120 died from the effects of the chemical agents and an undetermined number suffered long-term damage or died prematurely.

Since then, research has made significant advances. The academics argue that the ability exists to create much more “sophisticated and targeted” weapons that would once have been unimaginable.

Dando said: “The same knowledge that helps us treat neurological disorders could be used to disrupt cognition, induce compliance, or even in the future turn people into unwitting agents.”

The threat is “real and growing” but there are gaps in international arms control treaties preventing it from being tackled effectively, they say.

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Democrat MELTDOWN of the Week: Rep. Hakeem Jeffries Blames Trump for EXTREME WEATHER in ABSURD New Attack

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries delivered one of the most exaggerated and unserious climate speeches of the year during a press event on the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol this week. 

Speaking Wednesday afternoon alongside Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Jeffries attempted to link President Donald Trump to everything from global weather patterns to home-insurance rates—an attack that revealed more about Democrat messaging than about any legitimate climate data.

Rep. Jeffries opened by accusing President Trump and congressional Republicans of being “unwilling” to address the cost-of-living challenges facing Americans. 

But instead of acknowledging the reality—falling inflation, lower energy costs, rising wages, and a growing labor market under Trump—Jeffries pivoted into a sweeping claim that the administration is responsible for worsening “extreme weather events.” 

The statement came without evidence, and it came during a week when the administration finalized new domestic energy permits and announced record-low gasoline prices in multiple states.

The most dramatic accusation came when Jeffries criticized the Trump administration for not attending the latest United Nations COP climate conference. 

He claimed this ceded “leadership to China,” ignoring the fact that China remains the world’s top polluter, continues to open coal plants at record speed, and actively undermines global emissions standards. 

President Trump has repeatedly stated that he will not send American officials to conferences where the United States is lectured while China receives exemptions.

Jeffries then attempted to draw a “direct connection” between climate change and home-insurance costs. 

But he failed to mention that the insurance crisis in states like California and New York is driven overwhelmingly by Democrat policies—overregulation, failure to thin forests, refusal to prosecute arson, skyrocketing crime, and restrictive underwriting rules that have pushed insurers out of entire regions. 

Under President Trump, states with market-friendly regulations—Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Utah—have reported more stable insurance markets and faster reconstruction after storms.

Jeffries also insisted that Republicans “took a sledgehammer” to the clean-energy economy. 

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Inside NATO’s procurement scandal: How corruption at NSPA exposes a rot at the heart of the alliance

NATO’s central procurement arm, the Luxembourg-based NSPA, has become the focus of a widening corruption scandal that raises far deeper questions than the arrest of a few officials. What is emerging is not merely a story about individuals taking bribes, but about a procurement system that has grown opaque, unaccountable, and increasingly vulnerable to private interests feeding off NATO’s expanding military budgets.

Investigations led by Belgian prosecutors, coordinated through Eurojust and involving Luxembourg, Spain and the Netherlands, have uncovered suspicions ranging from leaking confidential tender information to laundering illicit payments through shell consultancy firms. Some NSPA personnel are alleged to have passed sensitive procurement data to select defence companies in exchange for covert rewards. These were not trivial contracts: drones, ammunition and other high-value military systems lie at the centre of the probe — areas directly affecting NATO’s operational capacities. NATO’s leadership rushed to issue the standard line of “zero tolerance for corruption,” insisting that the agency is cooperating fully with national authorities. But such statements sound hollow without transparency, accountability, or a willingness to confront the structural weaknesses that allowed these practices to take root.

The significance of NSPA cannot be overstated. It manages billions of euros’ worth of joint procurement for NATO member states and is expanding its remit as Europe increases defence spending and accelerates its armament programs. When procurement of this scale takes place behind closed doors, the risks multiply: public funds become vulnerable to siphoning, tender processes become susceptible to manipulation, and strategic dependencies can be shaped not by security needs but by the profit motives of a handful of companies and intermediaries.

Patterns emerging from journalism collaborations and internal documents suggest structural, not incidental, failures: weak oversight mechanisms, a culture of secrecy, and a procurement architecture heavily reliant on external consultants. In some cases, whistleblowers report being discouraged or ignored, raising the possibility that internal resistance to misconduct was actively stifled. This undermines the notion that the scandal is the result of isolated wrongdoing and instead points to deeper systemic rot inside NATO’s procurement framework.

A broader critique is unavoidable. As NATO expands its defence procurement appetite under the banner of “collective security,” it funnels vast amounts of public money into increasingly complex military supply chains with minimal democratic supervision. The result is a procurement ecosystem where militarisation grows unchecked, private contractors accumulate influence, and public accountability erodes. The NSPA scandal is ultimately a symptom of this imbalance: a defence alliance claiming democratic legitimacy while managing enormous budgets through structures that are anything but transparent.

The consequences are potentially far-reaching. Public trust in defence spending — ultimately, for the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine — risks further erosion as taxpayers see an alliance unable or unwilling to police its own procurement processes. Should sensitive procurement data indeed have been exploited, the integrity of NATO’s armament plans may have been compromised, allowing certain suppliers to distort competition or inflate prices. Over time, such distortions would entrench a procurement environment dominated by a limited set of defence firms, reducing competition and raising costs for every member state.

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FBI Admits Its Custody of Crooks’ Body on AGR Building Roof All Night

Kash Patel and Danny Bongino, the number one and two at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have, for the second time, gone public with the agency’s conclusion that the alleged Butler, PA shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was the lone shooter. Okay. But they refuse to release the FBI investigation of the attempted assassination and that’s a problem for a number of reasons.

First, despite numerous investigations, including a Congressional Task Force, a Secret Service investigation, a Senate Investigation, the Pennsylvania State Police and others, none have provided any information about how the alleged shooter, who “acted alone,” was identified on the AGR Building.

Recall that the alleged shooter’s body lay on the AGR Building roof all night until 6:30a.m. the following morning. Then, when the Butler County Coroner, William Young III, finally was allowed to go on the roof and conduct his death investigation and identification of the body, it’s anyone’s guess which law enforcement agency had custody of the body all night…until now.

Coroner Young has never made public his investigative notes about how he identified the body – the method – and why he was turned away at midnight when he first tried to make identification of the body and told to return the following day. Who gave Young those orders?  More importantly it’s odd that the body would lie on the roof all night.

Does the public trust that there wasn’t any funny business going on? Would Patel and Bongino believe that there wasn’t any funny business? It must be said that even Patel and Bongino in their former lives, who questioned every single FBI investigation, would have been having conniptions about this odd turn of events. Afterall, it isn’t every day that the dead body of a would-be presidential assassin is left at the crime scene all night.

Then, of course, there is the fact that Patel and Bongino provided this “exclusive update” to an unknown Fox News podcaster? Yep, Brooke Singman got the scoop, despite many others who could have actually asked legitimate questions about the FBI investigation. People like Miranda Devine of the New York Post who just last week outed the FBI for failing to report on the alleged shooter Crooks’s online presence. Of course, if you don’t want to have any serious questions asked Singman is the way to go.

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US Peace Plan Bears Striking Resemblance to German AfD Proposal — and Nobody in the Media Wants to Talk About It

US President Donald Trump has once again blown up the scripted narratives of Western foreign-policy elites by unveiling a sweeping 28-point peace plan for Ukraine.

His proposal doesn’t call for endless spending, escalation or for NATO brinkmanship—but for neutrality, security guarantees, territorial arrangements and economic rebuilding.

And here’s the part the media really doesn’t want discussed: Trump’s plan looks strikingly similar to a peace initiative introduced back in 2023 by the AfD in the German Bundestag under foreign policy spokesman Petr Bystron. In other words, the populists had the diplomatic roadmap long before the “serious” people running Europe.

Shared Strategic Premise: Endless War Is a Choice

Trump and the AfD start from the same inconvenient truth—Ukraine will not be “won” on the battlefield. Both proposals reject NATO expansion, call for permanent neutrality, and ban foreign troop deployments inside Ukraine. Both demand international security guarantees, a negotiated ceasefire and a phased military disengagement.

And both reject Washington and Brussels’ childish fantasy that shoveling weapons and cash into a corrupt war zone will magically produce peace.

Converging Approaches to Contested Territories

Even on the most explosive issue—territorial control—both plans take a sober, realistic approach. Trump outlines concrete territorial arrangements.

The AfD plan suggests internationally supervised transitional mandates followed by bilateral negotiations. Different mechanics, same logic: de-escalation, monitoring, and rebuilding instead of mass graves and propaganda slogans. The foreign-policy blob hates it because it acknowledges reality.

Key Differences Highlight Europe’s Failure

The AfD document, written in Europe rather than Washington, is actually the more diplomatic of the two. It doesn’t demand instant recognition of Russian-held territories.

It doesn’t dictate the size of Ukraine’s military or attempt to micromanage internal politics—features in Trump’s draft. Instead, it focuses on negotiations, UN or OSCE mandates and long-term stabilization. But the outcome is the same: stop the dying, stop the spending, stop the geopolitical LARPing.

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